The Science Of Love: A Billionaire BWWM Romance Read online

  “Yes,” she said. “Did you want something?”

  “The book,” he said to her. “How far are you into it?”

  She told him the page and subject. He asked her what she thought of it and she told him Wolfram had some good ideas, but the true test of any science was how reproducible it was. If the results he claimed were conclusive, then it would be a new kind of science. But she doubted it was an entirely new branch, just a subgrouping of an existing one.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he told her, “My name is David. I’m sorry if I interrupted.”

  “Jada,” she told him. “It’s okay. I haven’t found any other people who’ve tackled this book. Do you have it?”

  “Yes I do,” he said. “I’ve been a big fan of his programming language, Mathematica. I’ve used it several times to get some things to work I couldn’t in any other language.”

  “I have to leave, David,” she told him. “I've got a class in two minutes. You here for a class too?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “Advanced math. It kicks off in a few minutes too. You’re taking the bus back?”

  “At ten,” she said. “My class only meets once a week.”

  “I’m leaving at eight,” he told her. “I guess you’ll be here on Tuesday nights?”

  “Yes,” she said, gathering up her books and school papers to return to her backpack. “I guess I’ll see you next week.” At least he hadn’t tried something on her and seemed interested in the book she was reading. It was a favorite tactic of Jada to shut down the suitors when she was reading a book to ask them what the last one was they had read.

  “Do you live on campus?” he asked her. “I’m just off the college, in one of the apartments at the corner of McGuffy and Low Street.”

  “I’m still in the towers,” she told him, hitching the pack over one shoulder. “Will probably be there until I graduate.”

  “Would it be alright if I called you?” he asked. “I’d like to talk some more.”

  “Sure,” she told him and gave him her phone number. “Just not tonight and never after ten, I have roommates who don’t like to be disturbed. See you later.”

  He memorized her number and watched her go, the lithely figure drifting down the hall.

  Chapter 2

  David’s hands were shaking as he picked up the phone to call Jada. It was nine in the evening, well within the time frame he had allowed himself to speak with her. He couldn’t believe this beautiful woman had voluntarily given him her phone number. He only prayed it was a legitimate number and didn’t go directly to some prank line. That had happened to him one time; a woman had given him her phone number at a party and when he called it, it turned out to be a sex chat line. It was still a weeknight and he hoped she would be able to talk. He was in the bedroom of the apartment he shared with another computer science student. His roommate was out for the evening and he had the place to himself where no one would hear him make a fool of himself, if he did.

  The phone rang and he heard Jada say: “Hello?” David almost hung the phone back up again. It was too good to be true. The phone number was real and she would talk to him!

  He asked her how her day had been and they chatted for a bit about the college, their course work and the cost of tuition. They found they had much in common when it came to a love of science. David had seen the latest photographs of a space probe to Mars and she had as well. They both chatted about the possibility of life on the red planet and came to the conclusion it was very improbable. He loved science fiction and she was familiar with the works of Octavia Butler. Jada wanted to know if he had ever gone out dancing, one of her favorite activities and the silence on his end let her know all she needed. So she switched the conversation to the ballet and it turned out he had an aunt who danced for the Cleveland ballet and had been to see her many times. They talked longer than either of them expected to and made plans to speak on the phone again in two more days. David told her to have a good night and hung-up.

  David stood looking at the phone for a good while after he had finished talking to Jada. He couldn’t believe he had been able to hold a conversation with a woman for more than two minutes. He turned and looked at the clock: they had been on the phone for at least an hour! He felt he had achieved something, but he wasn’t sure what.

  Jada put the phone down as one of her roommates walked into the dorm room. She was a tall woman from New Jersey named Tanisha. Her father was a doctor in Salem, so she didn’t have any money troubles at all. Daddy had made sure his little girl had joined the right sororities and dated only the best athletes. She tended to give Jada advice on how to be “noticed” by the right people on campus. Jada appreciated her concern, but wasn’t interested in being noticed by anyone. She had her studies, her new dance company and an eye on a student teaching position with one of the better schools.

  “So who was that on the phone?” Tanisha asked Jada.

  “Just a guy,” she said, while pulling out a book on math education.

  “Sounds like your social life might be picking up,” Tanisha asked her. “Anyone I might know?”

  “White guy.”

  “You just described half the men on this campus,” she said. “Is he cute? Does he play on any of the teams?”

  “No,” she told her. “He’s a sophomore like me and majors in computers.”

  “Oh,” said Tanisha. “Computer guys make a lot of money. Keep it in mind.” Tanisha went on to her room.

  Jada smiled and returned to her book.

  It was the dawn of the internet age. Every college was being wired for high speed cable and the colleges were trying to keep up with how the data would be allowed to flow in and out of the campus. Everyone wanted to be a computer sales executive or an internet marketing guru. For the first time in history, it was very cool to be a nerd. There were people who came from nothing who were being touted as financial geniuses one day only to watch their net worth plummet the next. Famous magazines would do photo spreads on cool internet companies who wouldn’t exist in two years. Money was being made and blown in the space of nanoseconds. Paradigms were changing.

  And a whole lot of it was being driven by adult content on the internet. It was the dirty little secret of the internet that the ultimate brown paper bag had been discovered. Adult bookstores were being decimated as lonely men no longer had to shuffle inside and pay absurd amounts of money for their fix. The internet anonymous option was changing it all. The man who could find a way to make it all pay would emerge as the winner.

  But David had no interest into delving into the seedy side of the internet. Fortunes might be created in the adult content market, but he didn’t want to make himself seem like a pervert to any girl he might meet. How was he ever going to increase his success rate with women if they found out he was making money supplying lonely men with sex fantasies? And Jada, he had found out was from a religious family who would be shocked to know the man their daughter was going out with happened to be a porno king. So he needed to find some other way to make his fortune. He would find it if it took him years to do it.

  David had his finger in the internet marketing end of things. He was writing programs which could make it all possible on a fraction of the computing power which the older systems had needed. He had the ability to see where it was all going. He’d been forced to endure a math teacher in high school who thought personal computers were a waste of time even when it was obvious everyone was getting one. David was going to find a way to make some serious cash with his skills while everyone else was busy impressing their professors. He might have little skill with women, but that was all about to improve. Because, he felt, if he had the money, who cared what kind of social skills he had? He could hire someone to manage skills for him.

  Jada’s face began to obsess David. He had called and talked with her three times but still hadn’t had the nerve to ask her out. He avoided the student lounge where they met because he didn’t want to run into her again and have nothing to say. He
felt so far below her in status it made him sick. How could he hope to ever match her standards? The hell with race, what man with a pulse wouldn’t want to spend an evening with her? He dreamed of her every night and saw her face in his sleep. She would always be sitting on the carpeted floor of the lounge and looking up at him.

  And then it hit him, she liked science and math, why not a trip to local museum of industry? He would call her up and ask Jada if she wanted to go visit it. Neither one of them had cars, but they could always take the bus. He could look up the bus schedule and ride with her downtown to it. They could have a nice day walking around and looking at the exhibits. It was a great idea. He looked at the clock: it was only eight in the evening, she wouldn’t mind if he called her a little early. David punched out her number and waited for the phone to start ringing.

  “You weren’t supposed to call me this early,” Jada told David when she picked up the phone. “I’m at Lyon Hall and in the middle of a game. Call me in another hour when I’m back at the dorm.”

  “Game?” was all he could manage to get out of his mouth.

  “I’m at the Go club. It’s the one night I let myself go play,” she told him. “Look if you really want to meet, just come by the room and you can walk me back.” She gave him the room number of where she was.

  David hung up his phone and thought. She played Go? He’d attempted the game once or twice, but it didn’t interest him. He stuck to chess which he’d learned from his cousins. He would spend dull winter nights over at their house trying to keep from being obliterated by them. His cousins, every one of them boys, would play against each other all the time and became quite good at the game. He would play them only when he visited. They would use him to try out different moves and see how fast they could beat him. He eventually learned enough to keep from getting slaughtered, but never reached their level.

  Go was the sort of game which seemed to him very easy at the surface, but incredibly complex once you started learning it. Played out on a series of seventeen by seventeen grind lines where you placed stones of white and black on the intersections, it was wildly popular in Asia and had been so for over a thousand years. When you surrounded your opponent’s stone with your stones on the cardinal points, they lost the space. It could also happen with entire groups of stones. The game could last days between seasoned players who didn’t want to yield territory. It ended when one opponent captured all the other’s territory or one party voluntarily surrendered.

  David had attended a few meetings of a Go club in high school, but didn’t have the level of dedication these people had to the game. They would sit and stare at the board for hours, trying to find an opening against their opponent. Overseas tournament were so wildly popular that they would be covered on TV and in the newspapers. After a few attempts at trying to learn the game, David had moved back to chess with his cousins.

  But knowing Jada enjoyed the game made his interest grow. He now had a reason to learn it and an excuse to be around her. Perhaps the trip to the museum wasn’t such a good idea after all. She had invited him to walk her home from the club meeting, so now he had another reason to go over there. It was getting cool outside, so David tossed his jacket on after shutting down his computer.

  On the way over to the building he tried to think of a way to impress her with his general knowledge of the game. He knew the basic rules, but no strategy. Go was a game popular with some programmers as it was seemingly simple, but filled with layers of complexity, not unlike a program which had been elegantly written. He decided to show up early and watch her play, not making comments, but appearing to nod and look interested every time she put down a stone.

  He showed his campus ID card to the bored security officer on duty and entered the building. It was one of the older administrative buildings on the campus had been rebuilt in 1976 to resemble the historic building where the Declaration of Independence had been signed two hundred years previously. This created all kinds of confusion since there was another building called “Independence Hall” which didn’t look at all like the historic building. It usually took new students a few months to get it right.

  He went up the stairs and saw a light in a room that had an open door. David walked in, cleaning his glasses on his shirt absent-mindedly as he did so. He looked into the room and saw a series of tables and chairs sat-up. There were five sets of people playing each other and concentrating on what they were doing. As he observed what they were doing, one man slapped a stone on the board and stared at his opponent, a man about thirty years of age, across from him. His opponent smiled and placed a stone down against his. The man who had slapped the stone down looked at the board, got up and marched out through the other entrance to the room. His opponent shrugged his shoulders and gathered up the stones, putting them into their separate baskets. He saw David watching him

  “He just can’t understand how I pull it off,” he said, smiling as he put the Go set away.

  David found Jada on the other side of the room. He walked over to her table and sat down, watching the game she had in progress. Jada was playing a man in his sixties who wore a business suit. The older man sported a salt-and-pepper beard and was concentrating on the board before him. It was painfully obvious he was losing the game. Jada had surrounded his black stones with her white ones and was closing in the final blow. The man placed one stone down on the board carefully and looked back at her with desperation in his eyes. He wanted her to make one mistake he could use to save his forces.

  But it was too late. Jada sat her stone down, looked at him and said “Atari” the traditional Japanese announcement that you were about to lose your stone. The older man looked at it and dropped his head. She had beaten him. There was no further room he could claim without setting up a pattern which would lead to the loss of an entire group of stones. He could have spent the rest of the evening fighting a losing strategy, but it was best to end it now.

  “You nailed me,” he told her. “I should have seen it coming in the second move.”

  “Nonsense,” she told him. “You gave me a three stone handicap. If you hadn’t done that at the beginning, it would have ended differently.”

  “I’ll know better than to do it the next time,” he laughed. The man put his coat on, told everyone to have a pleasant evening and left the room.

  “Was he a pretty good player?” David asked Jada. He didn’t want to seem like a complete ignoramus, but he had trouble understanding the last few moves.

  “One of the best in the club,” she told him. “First and only time I’ve ever beat him. It took me a good hour to do it, but it was worth the time. He won’t give me an advantage the next time.”

  “So how is this game played?” David asked her. “I’ve played it before, but it’s been years since I last tried.”

  Jada looked at the clock on the wall. It was getting late. She still had plenty of studying to do, but had time to show him a few basic things. She had an early dance rehearsal in the morning and was in classes all afternoon. She wore a large sweater over a pair of jeans and had her book bag next to her.

  David sat with her for the next hour until the club room had to be cleared out. She showed him the different patterns she used on her opponents and which ones spelled victory. She showed him some early strategy to use against an opponent of equal skill and what worked on someone of a far lower ability. She told him about the ranking system and where she was in relation to the other players in the room. David sat spellbound listening to her and watching her nimble fingers glide across the board.

  In his mind he was alone with Jada, kissing her long fingers and telling her how much he loved her natural hair. He had once saw a black woman braid a friend’s hair on the beach and sat just out of their visual range watching them. In his fantasies he would be alone with Jada braiding her hair into tight rows. Then she would lean back on him and tell David how much she loved what he had been doing.

  Jada introduced him to the other club members before she
left. Most of them were either White or Asian, but there were a few Black guys as well. Not too many women for some reason. The Go club would not have been a place to meet girls if you were a young man interested in the opposite sex. They were all glad he had come and looked forward to seeing him there on a regular basis. He couldn’t tell them Jada was the only reason he was there to learn the game. It was so he could find an excuse to be around her. It seemed he had plenty of rivals for her affection by all the hugs she gave out when they left.

  They walked down the idle campus streets, which were almost deserted that time of the evening. The only people out were students returning to dorm rooms and professors and teaching associates on their way back from the main library. They walked past the main library which towered over the campus ten stories high. It was an impressive structure and paid for by tax money and contributions. It was open all night and students could be found in it any hour of the day studying for the latest exam.

  They talked about their families and what their long term plans were going to be. David was sure there had to be a way to make money in the internet marketing companies which were exploding all over the country. Jada saw herself as a teacher in five years at a rural school, similar to the one she had attended while growing up. She wanted to open her own dance studio someday. As they walked, her hand slipped into his and they grew silent.

  David couldn’t believe he was fortunate. She was letting him touch her hand! Inside he was cheering, on the outside he was trying to remain calm and not show his excitement. Jada was starting to like this tall computer guy. He treated her well, showed some interest in the things she like and, most of importance, didn’t try to get in her pants the first time he met her.

  The walked up to the dorm where she lived and David finally broke the silence.

  “I guess this is good night,” he said to her.

  “Thanks for walking me home,” she told him.

  And then Jada leaned over and gave him a kiss on the lips. David was transfixed. He was lost in her touch and stood looking into her beautiful brown eyes with his blue ones as she embraced him and let the kiss linger for a few seconds longer than a friendly one. She pulled back and looked at him. David hadn’t tried to push for more than she had given him and he was a decent kisser. David, took her hand and leaned forward into her, giving her a kiss in return on the cheek, not too aggressive, but enough to let Jada know he wanted to show her some affection. For a second, Jada wondered if he wanted to go further, but she needed to study. Besides, it was still early in their relationship and she didn’t know how much further it could go. They had plenty of time to date and see if there was anything more.